Running a Service with Large, Low Cost Mailboxes

Running a Service with Large, Low Cost Mailboxes

This video provides some answers to the question we’ve heard a lot – How can you provide large mailboxes in the service at such a low cost? In the video, I talk about some of the ways that enable us to get the costs of our service so low, which helps us provide a low cost service for our customers. We focused on things that are really intrinsic to running a broad service.

The video covers few different areas - Time Averaging, Efficient Data Centers, User Profiles and how the things we’ve learnt from the service can help customers who are running their Exchange system on-premises. One additional thing that we didn’t get a chance to talk about, which also helps reduce costs dramatically, is the benefit we get from using PowerShell to automate almost every aspect of our deployment, monitoring and management of the service. Since people costs can be a large part of deployment and management costs, this automation enable us to streamline our operations and are very important to the economics of the service.

Oh, and just to clarify the part of the video when I talked about paying attention to the profile of the users in the service - I was only talking about the statistical aspects of the aggregate load. We don't look at what a particular person or organization is doing, nor do we read their mail! That would be invading people's privacy which we don't do. The Office 365 Trust Center has more details about how we think about this: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/trust-center.aspx

Want to know more about how we built Exchange? Use the comments section to send me your thoughts, ideas and questions.